ISCWP Newsletter Volume 10, Issue 1

Greetings!  Many of you will have recently received the latest ISCWP Newsletter.  For those who are not on the ISCWP membership list, you can find out about the the society’s activities and events by following the link above and looking through recent newsletters, which are all available there.

If any readers are not members of the ISCWP and would like to join, please send me a statement including the following contents: your name, academic affiliation (if applicable), research/interest areas, contact information, and your desire to become a member of the ISCWP.

Hagop Sarkissian

Secretary and Treasurer

ISCWP

ISCWP Newsletter 9.2

Greetings!  Many of you will have recently received the latest ISCWP Newsletter.  For those who are not on the ISCWP membership list, you can find out about the the society’s activities and events by following the link above.

If any readers are not members of the ISCWP and would like to join, please send me a statement including the following contents: your name, academic affiliation (if applicable), research/interest areas, contact information, and your desire to become a member of the ISCWP.

Hagop Sarkissian

Secretary and Treasurer

ISCWP

I am virtuous, and I hate you.

Actually, both parts of that conjunction are false: I am far from virtuous, and I probably don’t hate you.  (Really I don’t.)  But say I were virtuous: what would be the problem with me hating some people?  Would feeling hatred toward some individuals detract from my overall moral standing?  And forget about poor old un-virtuous me.  What about someone who, by all accounts, really was virtuous–Confucius.  Would it detract from his moral standing if he hated some people?

Translate This!

I’m sure many of us have this practice: You see a new translation of a text that is near and dear to you, and the first thing you do is pick it up and flip to those handful of passages that you think are crucial in understanding the text to see how the translator has parsed them.  (I can’t be the only one, right?)

One such passage (for me, anyway) is 1.12 in the Analects.  Here it is:

有子曰：「禮之用，和為貴。先王之道，斯為美；小大由之。有所不行，知和而和，不以禮節之，亦不可行也。」

Here are two ways of understanding the first part of this passage.

Teaching Yang Zhu

In my Classical Chinese Philosophy class I like to include some discussion of why Yang Zhu was seen as such a powerful adversary for Mengzi and the Confucians, but given the paucity of texts the task is not an easy one.